Our Level Up series shares the strategies that help landscape and lawn care companies get to the next level.
At Father Nature Landscapes, based in Birmingham, Alabama, their whole design philosophy is about creating livable landscapes.
“We feel these wins when people have weddings in their garden spaces, when they have birthday parties in their garden spaces, or even just dinner parties,” says Andrew McCurry, owner of Father Nature. “All that, we’re high fiving around here.”
Father Nature has always served the residential side of the industry, but as they’ve gotten larger, they’ve been able to take on some commercial and municipal work as well.
About 80% of their revenue is from design/build services, while the remaining 20% is from maintenance.
“We’re definitely trying to turn that,” McCurry says. “This branch in Birmingham, we’re going on our 16th year, and so if we’re going to exit in 10 years or 15 years, we’ve got to make it more equitable by building our service department and focusing more on that. We’ve got a great service department manager, but we’re definitely going to be putting more effort towards building our current revenue stream.”
In 2024, the company’s annual revenue was $11.2 million. Father Nature’s goal is to reach $30 million in annual revenue.
McCurry defines success for his company as when both his employees and customers are happy, and as a business, they make a profit. He says he wants his team members to be able to leverage their strengths and make enough money to pursue their dreams. He also wants his clients to find value in their services, enjoy the spaces created for them and know the money spent was well worth it.
Forms of Growth
While McCurry first started Father Nature in high school, when he and his wife relocated to Tacoma, Washington, in 2006, he relaunched the brand there.
Eventually, after having kids and moving back to Alabama, McCurry offered his employee Chris Scheer an equity ladder so he would gain shares of the company over time as he ran the Tacoma location.
Last year, they hired a managing director for that location to free up his partner from wearing so many hats.
McCurry says the two Father Natures are corporately separated, so if one went bankrupt, it would not affect the other location. They are also developing separate websites for the two so it will be easier to optimize. McCurry says their culture is different at the Tacoma location, but he doesn’t try to micromanage them as it works well for their operation.
Meanwhile, their Birmingham location had its best year yet with 30% growth in 2024, despite only planning for 15%. He says this year, they’re trying to grow by 15%.
“I don’t think we, or many companies, could sustain 30% growth year after year without depleting all of your capital because it cost a lot to grow,” McCurry says.
They’ve had several other jumps in growth over the years, and McCurry says these periods were bearable but not sustainable.
McCurry says he’s constantly thinking about what needs to happen as they reach the next level. McCurry has a two-hour business development meeting every week with his partner and managing director.
“If you want to develop as a business, you have to set aside time to plan your development, and that’s definitely one of the things that has helped us to be able to navigate growth because you can outgrow your certain structure,” McCurry says.
From the beginning, they’ve hosted a three-day annual corporate meeting in the fall where they would strategize, vision cast and problem solve.
“We would pay for a consultant to come in and help us strategize and to make sure that we’re in line with what they saw as being a healthy company and making sure we didn’t have any blind spots,” McCurry says. “That has been pretty instrumental.”
As the company has grown, they’ve added on an irrigation division and a carpentry division.
“They take a lot of load off of our subcontractors that we typically use,” McCurry says. “Now that our service department is getting larger, they take care of our customers first, like our loyal customers that have weekly or biweekly service, and then we’re able to go out on other service calls as those things have been prioritized.”
Keys to Success
McCurry says one of their keys to success has been staying on the cutting edge of design.
“We’ve got some people here that just have good style and have fresh, relevant ideas,” McCurry says.
Customers seek out Father Nature for their design/build services, thanks to their innovative designs.
“We have a look that people can get behind,” McCurry says. “Our big theme is livable landscapes. Our tag line is connecting life and land, and that’s the type of landscapes that we want to build are landscapes that help to connect lives with their land and getting people outdoors in their spaces.”
He says focusing on employee development has been another major aspect of their success.
“Turnover is still higher than we want it to be, but if we would have never developed a recruiting strategy and a training strategy, I just don’t see how we’d be in the position we’re in now,” McCurry says.
McCurry says there isn’t a secret sauce to their training. They are simply willing to put in the work.
“We invest a lot in our infrastructure and in building our people, and we’re trying to build a company so that again, in 10 or 15 years, there’s something here that someone wants to buy,” McCurry says.
McCurry says their faith has also played a role as they pray over their team three times a week. He says they are not apologetic about their beliefs.
“We definitely feel like favor has been poured out over this place based on how we steward the resources that we’ve been given, and so that’s definitely one of the reasons that we have been successful, is because of how we operate and whose we say we are.”
McCurry says that they maintain their company culture as they grow by choosing to live out their values on a day-to-day basis.
“Culture is that thread that is woven throughout every relationship that you deal with, whether it be a customer, employee, vendor, anything,” McCurry says. “Everybody has a culture, it’s just some people talk about it more than they just allow things to just happen. The culture is who you are as a company and it ends up being who you’ve recruited to be ambassadors of your company.”
Recruiting and Retention
Father Nature has 62 employees on staff. Over the last five years, having a recruiter working for them has really helped. McCurry says that by investing in recruiting, they’ve been able to staff up appropriately.
“You just can’t do it all,” McCurry says. “If you want to really get good talent, and then you’re going to have to designate someone to focus on recruiting talent.”
McCurry says they do look for hires who have that ‘work hard muscle’ in them as it is one aspect that is hard to train. They also have a referral bonus program where if the employee stays with them for 90 days, they’ll receive $500.
While their recruiter has certainly helped, McCurry says finding people is still one of the major challenges.
“You can’t build a company without building people and recruiting people, and so I still think there’s a lot of room in our industry for better training,” McCurry says.
McCurry says one of the strengths of their company is their training. He says they have programs for each and every position with growth tracks that cover employees’ first 30, 60, and 90 days with the company.
“One of our values is value, meaning we don’t want to send someone out into someone’s yard and bill X amount of dollars per hour for the services and them not really bring that, plus some,” McCurry says. “It’s our job to train these people so that they’re a value add when they’re on these customers’ sites.”
They retain their team members by respecting them, training them, and showing them a career path. McCurry says they care about their people and want the best for them.
They assign new hires a mentor who helps them settle into their new role. Father Nature also provides bonuses based on how they hit their profit goals.
McCurry says that every employee is an ambassador of the company, so they set clear expectations on their behaviors from being safe and not compromising quality to operating efficiently.
“If we don’t operate in a production-minded way, then we won’t be a company long because that’s the only way that we can make money,” McCurry says. “We have to charge more than what it actually cost us produce so that these things are able to be sustainable.”
Click here to read more Level Up stories.
